


Who Knew It Would Be You and Me

by TheNarator



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: BAMF!cisco, BAMF!jesse, Brotp: Quickvibe, Gen, I have no idea what the age difference is but it's enough to make me uncomfortable, Jesse and Cisco friendship, Someone gets beaten to death with a chunk of rebar, for checkerboardom's birthday, not a romantic ship, seriously if you're not OK with that don't read this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-06
Updated: 2016-02-11
Packaged: 2018-05-12 05:13:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5653639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheNarator/pseuds/TheNarator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which two victims take their power back and Zoom learns why you shouldn't mess with Vibe and Jesse Quick.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. We Needed Heroes, So Heroes We Became

**Author's Note:**

  * For [checkerboardom](https://archiveofourown.org/users/checkerboardom/gifts).



It's a little hard to focus on anything but the pain in his leg as Jesse helps him limp into the alleyway. Dimly he's aware that Zoom has to be somewhere behind them; everyone had scattered in different directions as Barry tried to lead Zoom away, but Zoom hadn't taken the bait and Cisco has no idea what happened to Barry in the confusion. He's not really sure what happened to his leg either; one minute he'd been trying to keep track of Barry's position and the next there'd been a sound that might have been a gunshot and might have been breaking bone before the pain hit and his knees gave out from under him. Maybe it's gratitude for being the one to pull her out of Zoom's cage and maybe it's just her good heart that makes Jesse stop to help him, but honestly he doubts it's going to do either of them any good.

The plan failed. They have no way to stop Zoom. It's over.

Once they're far enough back from the mouth of the alley that they're no longer visible in the light from the street lamps, Jesse sets him down. Cisco stifles a little yelp as she kneels beside him and forces him to straighten his leg. He glances down at it, then immediately looks away, trying not to retch. It looks . . . bad.

"We need something to stop the bleeding," Jesse says, sounding like she's trying desperately to hold it together. She looks wildly around the alley but there's nothing, just a few bits of discarded building materials and some trash cans. Cisco sits up a little more and tries to wrestle out of his jacket, and immediately Jesse moves to help. Once they have it off she ties it tightly around his calf, pressing painfully on the wound and making Cisco cry out.

Jesse makes a shushing noise, but it's drowned out by the  _whoosh_  as a streak of blue lightning passes by the entrance to the alley. Both of them freeze, breath caught, but there's really nothing to be done. Zoom is too fast to make checking every alley in Central City an unreasonable task, and it's only a matter of time until he finds them here.

Jesse stands up.

"What are you doing?" Cisco hisses as she moves to stand between him and the mouth of the alley. She bends down and picks up a discarded length of rebar, holding it like a bat as she braces herself on the ground with feet apart.

She doesn't answer his question, and he doesn't get a chance to ask again before Zoom is suddenly there. He stands just inside, at the edge of where the streetlight penetrates, surveying them coldly.

"Enough games," he declares in his deep, gravely voice. "This ends now."

"Come on then!" Jesse calls back, readying her make-shift weapon. There's no way she's going to hit him with that, no way she can actually  _win_ , but she's been in his cage too long and she's not going back. She'll die first.

Everything seems to slow down at he races toward her, and Cisco can see it all in perfect clarity. Zoom is going to get to Jesse before she can even start to swing. He's going to take her weapon from her, and then he's going to drive his claws into her belly until she lies broken and bleeding at his feet. Cisco can't get up to help her, couldn't have defended her even if he could stand, and the horrible inevitability of her death makes something inside him tremble violently at the sheer powerlessness of them both. He feels something welling up inside him, like a scream but with his whole body instead of just his lungs, and when he reaches a hand out uselessly toward Jesse and Zoom it somehow, _somehow_ comes out his fingertips.

A shockwave not unlike the one from the particle accelerator sweeps through the alley. Jesse drops the tip of the rebar to the ground and uses it to prop herself up so she keeps her feet, but Zoom is knocked backwards, landing sprawled on the ground. He makes a noise reminiscent of when Cisco hit him with the slow-gun, like a groan but more menacing, and struggles dizzily to his feet.

At normal speed.

There's no lightning coming off him like a broken light grid spitting sparks, and he looks at both his hands in confusion before turning his gaze on Cisco. For a moment the pain in his leg is pushed aside by the adrenaline that dumps into his veins at Zoom's cold, piercing look, but then suddenly the Black Speedster turns and starts running way. He flees, in itself a strange and unfamiliar sight, but more importantly he flees no faster than an ordinary human can run. He's not using his speed. _He has no speed_.

Jesse gives chase. She probably shouldn't be able to catch up to him, what with the stiff state of her legs and the amount of running that he does, but Zoom is disoriented and Jesse is desperate and she eats up the distance between then in the enclosed space as he makes for open ground. She swings wildly with the rebar and it connects glancingly with his back, but it's enough to force him to his knees. The next swing hits him solidly in the back of the head, and he crumples to the alley floor as Jesse stumbles to a halt standing over him. She doesn't stop though, she swings again and again, hitting him on the back of the head over and over, making a sound somewhere between a scream and a growl with every strike.

Eventually the sound of the rebar connecting with Zoom's head starts sounding less hard and more wet. Blood and brain start shooting in all directions with every hit, and before long Jesse's face and arms are speckled with red as she continues to pound at Zoom's ruined skull.

"Jesse," Cisco says quietly, but she can't hear him over the sound of her own cries. "Jesse!" he tries again, louder this time, and she stops and turns abruptly, like she's just remembered he's still there. She looks from him, to Zoom, to the chunk of rebar still in her hand, and Cisco half expects her to drop it in horror. She doesn't though, she keeps hold of it as she makes her way back to where Cisco is still lying on the ground.

"Are you OK?" she asks, and her voice is a little raw from screaming but at least it doesn't shake.

"I'm super," Cisco replies dryly, and the humor in the sarcasm seems to clear out just enough of the adrenaline for him to pass out.

***

Cisco wakes up in Caitlin's make-shift ER in STAR Labs. It's the same one where they treated Barry after his first fight with Zoom, so there's an actual door, and only room for one chair between that and the bed. There's room on the other side of course, all that equipment has to go somewhere, but there's something oddly special about the one and only chair that can sit between the person lying in the bed and the only way to get at them.

That chair is currently occupied by Jesse, sleeping with her arms folded and her head drooping onto her chest.

"Hey," says Cisco weakly, and immediately she jerks awake. She looks around fearfully for a minute, then she sees him and seems to realize where she is.

"Hey yourself," she replies, relaxing again. "Welcome back to the land of the living."

"Where I am very grateful to be, thanks to you," Cisco tells her solemnly, and she smiles wanly. "How's Barry?"

"He's alright," she assures him, "you had the worst of it."

"How are you?" he asks. She knows perfectly well he doesn't just mean the events of the last twenty four hours.

Jesse nods, a bit uncertainly. "I'm OK," she tells him, as though she herself is surprised by the revelation. "I feel . . . better."

"Shouldn't you be with your dad?" he asks skeptically. Not that he could blame anyone for avoiding Harry, but he _had_ traveled between dimensions to get her back.

"You think I was gonna leave you?" she asks teasingly; she's avoiding the question, and he lets her. "I had to fight Barry for this chair you know."

A little laugh bubbles up from inside Cisco's chest at the idea of someone fighting to stay with him, but Jesse's smile is warm, not mocking, and after a moment he stops laughing. "Hope he wasn't too hard on you," he jokes, smiling unsurely.

Jesse's smile is wider now, a little more vicious, as she reaches down beside the chair and comes up with the chunk of rebar. "This helped," she says simply.

"You still have that?" Cisco demands, eyeing it dubiously. He can see that one end of it is still very clearly covered in a flaky brown substance he'd rather not think about.

"I'm thinking of keeping it," Jesse muses, looking at it with something approaching fondness, but then she sets it in her lap. "What also helped was this."

She holds up a hand, and as Cisco watches it begins to vibrate at superspeed, sparking off a familiar blue lightning.

"Holy-" Cisco trails off, staring at her.

"Believe me," she says dryly, stopping the vibration and lowering her hand, "no one was more surprised than I."

"How did that happen?" Cisco wants to know.

Jesse shrugs. "It seems that Jay's theory about the Speed Force being a living thing wasn't too far from the truth. It was inhabiting Zoom like a parasite; with one host compromised it jumped into the next available body."

"The nearest non-metahuman," he realizes.

Jesse makes a clicking noise with her tongue and points demonstratively at herself. "Not a non-meta anymore."

"How you feel about that?" Cisco asks carefully.

Jesse picks up the rebar again, twirling it idly in her hands. "I felt the spark run up my arm," she tells him. "Didn't think anything of it at the time, until I got to STAR Labs with you much faster than expected in a streak of blue lightning, and my dad started shooting at me."

"Are you OK?!" Cisco demands, sitting up a little more. That jostles his leg and he winces, sinking back down as Jesse looks at him worriedly. "He didn't hit you did he?" he presses once he's settled back onto the bed.

Jesse snorts. "My dad couldn't hit the broad side of a barn, let alone a speedster," she scoffs. 

"Yeah I noticed," Cisco informs her, and they both laugh.

"It was pretty funny watching Jay and Barry run around trying not to get hit," she admits, still grinning. "Even funnier when I told them that you managed to shut off Zoom's powers with that . . . vibration blast. They didn't know what to do with themselves, ended up just running laps around the room until Caitlin stabilized you."

That image makes Cisco laugh so hard he can't even manage to stop when the pain from his leg hits, so he sits there shaking helplessly while Jesse giggles behind her hands.

"I guess that means Jay has his . . . parasite, back," Cisco speculates as they both wipe tears from their eyes.

"Yep," Jesse confirms, "the Crimson Comet has returned, superspeed intact."

"What are you gonna do with yours?" he asks curiously.

"Not sure," she admits uncomfortably, looking down.

"What are you gonna do with that?" he asks next, nodding at the chunk of rebar.

Jesse holds it up to examine it again. "I think I might make something out of it."

"Modern art?" Cisco speculates helpfully.

"More like a weapon," she says idly. "Maybe a baton or something. Could double as a taser, with my powers."

Cisco nods. "I can see that," he concedes, his mind already spinning off in three different directions as he imagines all the ways that could be achieved. "Could give you a hand, if you want."

Jesse smiles, and it isn't mocking or vicious or even all that warm. It is bright, though, bright and happy, like today is good and tomorrow will be better and for the first time in a long time she's looking forward to it.

"I'd like that," she tells him, in a tone approaching happy, and when she smiles this time Cisco smiles back.


	2. You Need to Wake Up Because I Can't Do This Without You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What happened while Cisco was asleep, from Jesse's perspective.

Jesse sat next to Cisco’s bed, listening to the monitors beep and thinking about the last hour of her life. Compared to the last ten months worth of hours, which had all been very uneventful, a lot had happened.

She had been rescued, pulled out of Zoom’s cage by a boy who had hurriedly introduced himself before informing her that he’d been sent by her father and they really needed to move now. Once they were above ground and out in the open some kind of plan -- she was a little fuzzy on the details -- to defeat Zoom once and for all had been attempted and failed. Her rescuer had been injured in the resulting chaos, and the two of them had been forced to fight Zoom by themselves.

Jesse had killed Zoom.

She wan’t entirely sure how she was supposed to feel about that. She also wasn’t entirely sure how she was supposed to feel about Zoom’s powers, which had apparently jumped ship somewhere in the middle of her caving in Zoom’s skull and landed in her. Something about it seemed oddly fitting, in a variety of ways that weren’t all pleasant. Also she was a metahuman now, so . . . there was that.

Added to the list of things she wan’t sure how she was supposed to feel about was her father, who stood at the center of a very complicated web of emotions. The last time they’d spoken she’d been furious: she’d just found out that his particle accelerator had created the metahumans, that he was responsible for all the resulting chaos in Central City, and what was more, that he had _lied_  about it. To _her._  On the other hand, he’d saved her. He’d come for her, after almost a year, and he’d spent every moment she was in that cage trying to find her. He’d traveled between dimensions to find someone powerful enough to fight Zoom, all so he could rescue her.

That person was currently lying in front of her, his face ashen and his hair splayed out on the pillow like a halo, and in all this mess he was the one thing Jesse knew how she felt about. She wanted him to wake up. Badly.

She was in an unfamiliar place, with unfamiliar people, with an unfamiliar power crackling through her veins. Her father was the only thing that she recognized, but every time she thought about talking to him it felt like the world was spinning. The only thing she _knew_ in all of this was that Cisco had risked his life to save her. He was the first human besides her captor that she’d seen in almost a year, he’d rescued her from Zoom twice, and it was his voice that had cut through the haze of pain and rage when she’d nearly lost it in that alleyway. He was the only person she wanted to talk to, the only person she felt like she could _trust_ , so when Barry -- yet another speedster, who was also the Flash, but simultaneously wasn’t somehow -- had suggested that he stay with Cisco while she went with her father he’d nearly caught the business end of the chunk of rebar she’d been rather reluctant to let go of.

When she’d first arrived it had been easy to justify not wanting to see her dad. After she’d worked out the whole superspeed _thing_  enough that she could vaguely carry Cisco’s unconscious form she’d wandered the streets of the Unknown City until she reached what was unmistakably STAR Labs, even if it was nestled amidst a collection of buildings she’d never seen before. Speeding inside to look for help however, she’d been met with resistance from the strangest possible source.

Namely, her father with a big fucking gun.

Apparently he’d seen the streak of blue lightning and just assumed she was the speedster he’d been hunting, but once she let out a little shriek while dodging his first wide, sweeping shot he’d stopped to actually look at what he was aiming for.

“Jesse?” he’d demanded, sounding horrified and more than a little broken. “Oh god, is that you?”

“Put that thing down!” she’d snarled, and he’d dropped the gun like it had burnt him.

She wasn’t the only one who’d been forced to get out of his way either. Two other speedsters, Jay Garrick and the man who eventually identified himself as Barry, had also been trailing yellow lightning around the room as they tried to avoid getting hit, and the rest of the Cortex’s occupants were flattened to the ground.

As soon as Jesse’s father had put down his weapon however, a young woman who’d been crouching behind a computer bank sprang to her feet and ran to help Jesse with Cisco.

“Careful,” Jesse warned her, “he’s a metahuman. He did . . . something, to Zoom. It took his speed.”

Jay and Barry, who had both been approaching to help, suddenly zipped back again in alarm. An older man with a police badge immediately went to take their place, and he lifted Cisco easily from Jesse’s arms and carried him into a little room off the Cortex, which seemed to be set up as a kind of hospital room. The machines, once Cisco was hooked up to them, immediately announced their dissatisfaction with his physical state.

Perhaps as a consequence of this, Cisco had begun vibrating.

“Careful!” Jesse urged as the woman -- Caitlin, she found out later -- began to work on Cisco despite the fact that her patient was trembling so hard he was actually buzzing.

Jay and Barry didn’t seem to know what to do with themselves in the presence of a meta, in unstable medical condition, who could apparently shut off their powers. They both zipped from place to place with distressed expressions, afraid of Cisco’s power but unwilling to leave him, until the whole room was a pandemonium of yellow lighting and shrieking monitors.

Through this cacophony had come her father’s voice, whispering a raspy “Jesse” almost next to her ear, and she felt his fingers close over her arm, pulling her toward him.

She hadn’t really intended to activate her speed, but the power thrumming inside her seemed to respond to her distress and she suddenly found herself standing on the opposite side of the room. Unfortunately this didn’t deter her father, who seemed to be under the impression he had simply startled her.

“Jesse!” he repeated, louder this time, and started making his way swiftly toward her. “It’s just me, oh god I spent so long-”

“No!” Jesse snapped, this time consciously speeding back a few feet as he got close to her.

“Jess?” he asked, looking confused as he made for her again. “It’s me, it’s dad, I’m so happy you’re-”

Suddenly the cop who had taken Cisco from her stepped out in front of her father. “Hold on,” he interrupted in a deep, patient voice, “why don’t we all just calm-”

The cop’s sentence was cut short by Dr. Harrison Wells, founder of STAR Labs and the greatest tech entrepreneur who ever lived, socking him square in the jaw.

“What the hell is wrong with you!” Jesse demanded at a shout as her father glared at the cop with murder in his eyes.

Jesse still wasn’t sure how her father would have responded to that, because at that point Caitlin poked her head into the room and screamed, “All of you stop!”

That had been several hours ago. The cop, Joe, had argued quietly with her father while Caitlin had gotten Cisco stable, at which point Jay had stepped in with “For god’s sake Harrison you _shot_  at her!” which stemmed her father’s protests enough for Barry to escort him from the room at superspeed. Once that was settled she’d zipped in to grab the seat next to Cisco’s bed, between him and the door, and waved the chunk of rebar she hadn’t managed to discard at anyone who tried to take it from her. Caitlin had checked her over, pronounced her dehydrated and in need of rest and a few square meals, but not in any immediate danger. With Cisco stable and Jesse unwilling to leave his side, everyone had seemed to think it best that the two of them were just left alone.

Jesse hadn’t moved from the chair since then, and now she sat contemplatively watching Cisco’s chest rise and fall. She badly wanted him to wake up. She had questions, but she wasn’t sure who she could trust. Hell, if it hadn’t been for the Flash she might not have known she had even been right to bring him here; these might not be Cisco’s allies at all. She didn’t want to leave him, for his safety or her own, but the world outside this room wasn’t going to wait forever.

Nor, it seemed was her father.

“This is insane,” growled his voice from somewhere behind her, and she turned and looked through the glass wall to see him standing at the entrance to the Cortex, his way blocked by Joe, Barry and Jay.

“She’ll come out when she’s ready,” Joe was saying, voice firm but not argumentative. “She just needs-”

“You think you know what she needs West?” her father demanded. “What she needs is her father.”

“What she needs is _for_  her father to respect her wishes,” Joe replied, with a bit more force. Her father made to brush past him, but immediately Joe placed one hand in the center of his chest and easily pushed him back. “Don’t make me have Barry get you out of here.”

At that point Caitlin walked across Jesse’s field of view, then poked her head around the door.

“Your dad’s here,” she said, somewhat redundantly. “Do you want him to come in?”

Jesse shook her head. “No,” she said shakily, “no, I’m . . . I’m not-”

“It’s OK,” Caitlin interrupted, smiling gently, then went to join the three men barring her father’s way. She stood up on her toes to whisper something in Jay’s ear, then Jay nodded decisively and in a flash of lightning both he and her father disappeared.

Jesse sagged back into the chair, taking a deep, steadying breath. She hadn’t realized how badly she didn’t want to see her father just yet, but she knew he wasn’t going to wait for her to be ready. Eventually he was just going to force his way through. Using that gun, if necessary.

It would be easier, she thought, if Cisco could be there with her.

“Hey,” she said quietly, leaning over him. “I’m going to have to talk to my dad at some point, and I need . . . I need someone there. You need to wake up, because I can’t do this without you."


End file.
